artist Profiles

Launched in 2009, Juilliard Historical Performance is a full-scholarship program for advanced graduate students who specialize in early music on period instruments. At the heart of the program is a distinguished faculty that includes some of today’s most respected performers and scholars in the field, who teach studio lessons, coach chamber music, and lead rehearsals for public performances in New York City and beyond.

Juilliard415, the school’s principal periodinstrument ensemble, brings major figures in the field of early music to lead performances of both rare and canonical works by composers of the 17th through 19th centuries. The many distinguished guests who have led Juilliard415 include Harry Bicket, William Christie, Monica Huggett, Nicholas McGegan, and Jordi Savall. Juilliard415 travels extensively in the U.S. and abroad, and has performed on five continents, with notable appearances at the Boston Early Music Festival, Leipzig Bachfest, and Utrecht Early Music Festival, where Juilliard was the first-ever conservatory in residence. Juilliard415 made its South American début with a tour to Bolivia, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, and has twice toured to New Zealand.

With its frequent musical collaborator, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, the ensemble has performed throughout Scandinavia, Italy, Japan, Southeast Asia, the UK, and India. In a concert with the Bach Collegium Japan conducted by Masaaki Suzuki, Juilliard415 played a historic period-instrument performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in Germany. Previous seasons have been notable for side-by-side collaborations with Les Arts Florissants at the Philharmonie de Paris and with Philharmonia Baroque in San Francisco. Notable also are concerts directed by such eminent musicians as Ton Koopman, Kristian Bezuidenhout, and the late Christopher Hogwood.

Juilliard415 has performed major oratorios and Baroque operas every year since its founding, including a rare fully staged production of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie during the 2017–2018 season. During the 2018–2019 season, the ensemble presented Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at Opera Holland Park in London and the Royal Opera House of Versailles. The ensemble has also had the distinction of premiering new works for period instruments, most recently in The Seven Last Words Project, a Holy Week concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for which the ensemble commissioned works from seven leading composers, including Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, and Tania León.

Juilliard Historical Performance has been able to resume its activity in 2021–2022, including a collaboration with Philharmonia Baroque, concerts in New York, and performances in the Netherlands with the Royal Conservatoire The Hague. They will also tour Germany with the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. The season sees the return of Masaaki Suzuki, Pablo HerasCasado, William Christie, and Paul Agnew, plus a full schedule of public chamber music performances in New York City, at the Joye of Aiken Festival, South Carolina, and in Thiré and Paris, France, with members of Les Arts Florissants. n

An artist of international renown and an accomplished teacher, British tenor and conductor Paul agnew has made his mark on all the main international stages as a specialist in the music of the 17th and 18th centuries and as the performer of choice for the high-tenor roles of the French Baroque. After studying at Magdalen College, Oxford, he met William Christie in 1992 and subsequently became a close collaborator of the conductor and his ensemble Les Arts Florissants, while continuing

to perform with such other conductors as Marc Minkowski, Ton Koopman, Paul McCreesh, Jean-Claude Malgoire, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Philippe Herreweghe, and Emmanuelle Haïm.

In 2007, his career took a new turn when he began conducting certain projects for Les Arts Florissants. From 2011 to 2015, he undertook a complete cycle of Monteverdi’s madrigals, a project for which he directed nearly 100 concerts throughout Europe and made three recordings for harmonia mundi, the first of which won the Gramophone Award in 2016. He has conducted Les Arts Florissants in such productions as the ballet Doux Mensonges (Opéra de Paris), a new production of Rameau’s Platée (Theater an der Wien, Paris’s Opéra Comique, and New York’s Lincoln Center), and created a new production of L’Orfeo as part of the celebration of Claudio Monteverdi’s 450th anniversary—not to mention many concert programs. He is artistic director of the Festival de Printemps – Les Arts Florissants, which takes place in churches throughout the region of the Vendée, since its creation in 2017, and is co-director of Le Jardin des Voix, Les Arts Florissants’ academy for young singers. This interest in the training of new generations of musicians has led him to conduct the Orchestre Français des Jeunes Baroque, the European Union Baroque Orchestra and, in 2017, the European Baroque Academy in Ambronay. Dedicated to musical education for all, he has devised educational concerts such as Le Voyage de Monsieur Monteverdi and La Lyre d’Orphée.

As a guest conductor, Paul Agnew regularly conducts orchestras such as the Staatsphilharmonie Nürnberg, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin. Recent highlights also include a new production of Platée staged by Rolando Villazon at the Semperoper Dresden and a new reading of Gesualdo’s six books of madrigals with Les Arts Florissants also recorded by Harmonia Mundi, the first volume of which won the Gramophone Award in 2020. During the 2021–2022 season, he inaugurates a new series of concerts—“Bach, a life in music”— dedicated to Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas. Since 2020, Paul Agnew is Musical Co-Director of Les Arts Florissants. n

Originally from San Francisco, California, baritone Kyle Miller is a recent graduate of The Juilliard School. Miller performed on the Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall as the baritone soloist in Stravinsky’s Les Noces. Other concert works include Stravinsky’s Pribaoutki and Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem. Some former operatic roles include Figaro in The Barber of Seville, Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Moralès in Carmen, and Conte Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro. He was a Gerdine Young Artist for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’s 2020 and 2021 seasons and was awarded the Richard Gaddes Career Award. He is also a proud recipient of the Novick Career Advancement Award. This summer, he will be an Apprentice Artist at Santa Fe Opera singing the role of Fiorello in Il barbiere di Siviglia and covering the role of Le Dancaïre in Carmen. n

Born into a family of musicians, violoncellist Clara abel found a delight for music at an early age. Her particular love of chamber music led her to study with Joel Krosnick at Juilliard, where she received her Bachelor’s